Hospital 4.0 and Its Innovation in Methodologies and Technologies

The hospital is a center of healthcare services that, nowadays, can be considered as a highly technological corporation. In this work we introduce the Hospital 4.0 frame-work, discussing the innovation it would bring both at the methodological and technological level. Transforming the hospital organization from a multi-functional center where the patient is treated by different therapeutic units to an integrated center able to provide the patient with a personal care service, involving the patient as an active subject, represents the innovative challenge for the forthcoming years.

I. Introduction

In the recent years, healthcare organizations have been facing several critical issues, such as patient safety, quality of service, aging populations, rapid evolution of diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, transition to pervasive computer-based systems allowing data collection and patient management, financial constraints and budget reductions. Many of these critical factors are also interrelated in ways that the large availability of resources has only partially addressed: the extreme variability in the use of health services; the negative effects of excessive medicalization; the inequalities generated by the under-utilization of high-value health services; the inability to implement effective prevention strategies; the waste of resources ¹

It is worth noting that such issues are usually considered as five well-known problems in industrialized countries.